Read by Laurice White, a real Pseudopod hero who went above and beyond! Check her out at It’s Tha Voice!.

I’ve seen the Eater crawling back to his hut from the darkness, contorting and shuddering. We owe him for that. I’ve heard the madness that boils on the Eater’s tongue when he drinks of the froth from the bone-rattle tree. He is the only one who dares to taste it. I’ve seen him walk across the village as though he’s forgotten in which direction lies the earth and which the sky. He goes into the woods alone. After a time, his body has always returned. But he–the Eater I know or think I know, the laughing Eater with his clever tricks and dances–he stays away for even longer, unable to speak or unwilling, somewhere we can never go or see.

Wow. This was a good story, but the reading really elevated it. Even after just hearing two stories read by her, Laurice is quite possibly my second favorite EA reader after Ian Stewart. If y'all haven't checked out Podcastle's Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters go and download it and push it to the top of your "to listen" list.

Love the reading here, but I couldn't really get into the story. Kept going back and forth between trying to figure out what was supposed to be scary and what it was I was supposed to learn. But I'll give it a second listen, the accent was fantastic.

Logged

"Just remember what ol' Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, and the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of Heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big ol' storm right square in the eye and he says, "Give me your best shot, pal. I can take it."

I almost feel like I shouldn't comment sometimes because the condition I'm in has a lot of bearing on how I feel about the story. Sometimes I'm super-concentrated, sometimes I'm a bit tired and I think I dozed a bit during this one (perhaps partly due to the dreamy narration).

I guess I found it a bit long. I suffered a bit from not getting any visual description of the shufflers or the eater. But all up, that didn't really bother me. Some stories just leave a hazy feel at the end and I'm okay with that. I did get a Caribbean flavour due to the accent in the narration.

I hate to be the lone voice of dissent, but I found the narration quite distracting. From the story I would think that it was set in Africa, but most of the time she sounded more Jamaican, which is just something that I find pretty annoying. I would have ignored it and got into the story if it had been a bit more gripping but I also found the story itself hard to get my teeth into.

Ditto to what Birdless stated. Excellent reading, but still clueless. I got the intent (question what makes us human), but it was confusing. Still know not the roles/purposes of the eater or the speaker. Still don't really know what happened. I felt a bit cheated -I did my part of listening to the rambling but wasn't rewarded with a story. But the reading was great.

But, hey... I love the variety and the excellent opportunity to listen to new and distinct works.

Nice to see another new face around here. Sit a spell and don't worry about necromancing old threads. Necromancy's cool around here. The more you hang around these forums, the more you'll see the discussion recur regarding strict genre definitions. There's definately some cross appeal between the three EA podcasts. There's also a willingness to stretch past the boundaries of genre and accept good speculative fiction stories.

I think this is defensibly horror, not just because of the reaver attack and cannibalism, but also because of the protagonist's loss of innocence and lack of a happy ending resulting from that growth.

I dug this story, but the ending was... well, I was disappointed that it seemed like the narrator had failed to learn whatever lesson the Eater was trying to teach her. She begged to be taught, and then failed her final exam. Who knows what the future of the People of the Word will be, with a radical upstart Speaker to guide them and no Eater to teach them? A very interesting commentary on how language and culture interact.

Reminds me of a game called Primitive, by Kevin Allen Jr, in which the players are all members of a pre-language tribe of ancient humans. They must overcome obstacles and survive prehistoric dangers by cooperating through gestures and drawings. It's definitely a spin on standard role-playing-game fare, and fun.

I hate to be the lone voice of dissent, but I found the narration quite distracting.

Partly because I agree, and partly because nobody should be lonely here, I'll second that. Of course, I'm the crank that prefers to hear a story simply read instead of dramatized (can't hold back the years, I guess), so I'm overly accent and inflection sensitive, and am thereby obligated to hand out this nice grain of salt with every comment. (You'll have to just imagine the salt.)

The other problem I had, and seem to be having more and more lately, is that there are times when the narrator (especially when they've really committed to the story) sort of trails off into a whisper, and I lose the words into the ambient noise. This is my own fault, I guess, for listening during my commute instead of at home in the quiet dark, but it gets pretty frustrating, because the stories are so strong that I don't want to miss anything.

All in all, though, those are more nits to be picked than any real critique -- her voice is wonderful.

I love a story about the inadequecy of words. Couple that with a modern soceity evelution story and I'm hooked. I loved the description, the bigger themes and the horror of "that could have been us, at one time". Besides I can't say the title without the accent by the narrator, thats how much this story haunts me.